There aren’t many nonwhite non-men qualified to be Trump’s VP, because there aren’t many human beings qualified to be Trump’s VP

To be fair to Manafort, the bar for being “qualified” for the vice presidency is higher than usual when the man at the top of the ticket is Donald Trump. That’s because, as Manafort admits elsewhere in the interview with Fineman, the job of Trump’s VP will be to do the parts of the United States presidency Donald Trump “doesn’t want to do”:

“He needs an experienced person to do the part of the job he doesn’t want to do. He seems himself more as the chairman of the board, than even the CEO, let alone the COO.”

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This raises all kinds of much bigger questions about Trump’s suitability for the presidency: what “the part of the job he doesn’t want to do” is; how much of the job it entails; and why Donald Trump actually wants to be president of the United States to begin with. But as far as the VP search is concerned, it dovetails with comments Trump himself has made: that as someone with no experience in elected office, he wants a running mate who has spent time in government and knows how Washington works.